Wednesday, 28 September 2011

The statue, by sculptor Martin Jennings, was unveiled on the Hull Paragon Station concourse

on 2 December 2010, 25 years to the day after the poet Philip Larkin died.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

I would never recommend a shallow stream
and what was no more than a daisy chain
as being the ideal way to die.
It was far too pretty but I had to improvise
and I was a poet, far more so than him,
who threw out every word he ever thought
as if that might have kept his sorry life afloat.

I didn't drown by accident. I was a suicide.
At least let me call my mind my own
even when my heart was gone beyond recall.

Today, a car crash might have ben my final scene,
a black Mercedes in a tunnel by the Seine,
with no last words, no poetry,
with flashbulbs tearing at my broken body
because broken was the way I felt inside,
the cameras lighting up the wreckage of a life.
That would, at least, have been an honest way to die.

Tuesday, 6 September 2011

Living is no joke. You must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example,
I mean, expecting nothing above and beyond living,
I mean your entire purpose should be living.
You must take living seriously,
I mean so much so, so terribly
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall,
or in your fat goggles
and white laboratory coat
you can die for people,
even for people whose faces you have not seen,
without anyone forcing you,
even though you know the most beautiful, the most real thing is living.

I mean, you must take living so seriously
that, even when you're seventy, for example, you'll plant olive seeds,
and not so the trees will remain for the children,
but because though you fear death you don't believe in it,
I mean because living is more important.

2

Let's say we're due for serious surgery,
I mean there's a chance
we might not get up from the white table.
Even if it's impossible not to feel sorrow at leaving a little too early
we'll still laugh at the Bektashi joke,
We'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or impatiently await
the latest news.

Let's say we're on the front,
for something worth fighting for, let's say.
At the very first assault, on that very day
we could keel over and die.
We'll know this with a strange resentment,
but we'll still wonder madly
about how this war, which could last years, will end.

Let's say we're in prison
and nearly 50,
and let's imagine we have 18 more years before the opening of the iron doors.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people, its animals, its toil and wind,
I mean with the outside beyond the wall.

I mean, however and wherever we are
we must live as if we will never die.

3

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars,
and one of the smallest too,
a gilded granule in blue velvet, I mean,
I mean this tremendous world of ours.

This earth will grow cold one day,
and not like a chunk of ice
or a dead cloud -
it'll roll like an empty walnut shell
endlessly in the pitch black.

One must lament this now,
must feel this pain now.
This is how you must love this earth
so you can say "I've lived" . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Nâzim Hikmet1902-1963

translated from the Turkish by Deniz Perin

Nazim Hikmet was he first modern Turkish poet, as well as a playwright, novelist and memoirist. He was born in Salonika in the Ottoman Empire (now Thessalonika, Greece) and died in Moscow.

There is a tawny owl living in a hollow in the horse chestnut tree in the garden. In autumn, the female's kew-wick sounds for hours each evening and late into the night. As I type Puck's monologue from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' I hear her calling.

The call of the tawny owl sounds like 'komm mit' (come with) in German and is said to presage a death.

About Me

I was born and educated in Germany but I have lived in the UK for decades.
Before I started blogging, I had time for gardening, writing, reading, meeting friends, for poetry and literature, concerts and the theatre. I enjoyed cooking and feeding others.
Now, I do all these things if blogging permits.